On Wednesday, April 19, 2023, the IIJS hosted a book talk with Michael Frank, author of One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, in conversation with the Institute’s Dr. Isabelle Levy—a cousin of Stella Levi. This event commemorated Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which took place on April 18.
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award, and named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top ten books of 2022, One Hundred Saturdays recounts the remarkable story of ninety-nine-year-old Stella Levi, whose conversations with the writer Michael Frank over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Jewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale.
Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after that place has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays is a portrait of one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as well as an account of a tender and transformative friendship that develops between storyteller and listener as they explore the fundamental mystery of what it means to collect, share, and interpret the deepest truths of a life deeply lived.
Michael Frank is the author of What Is Missing, a novel, and The Mighty Franks, a memoir, which was awarded the 2018 JQ Wingate Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by The Telegraph and The New Statesman. The recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives with his family in New York City and Camogli, Italy.
Isabelle Levy (BA Columbia; PhD Harvard) is Academic Program Director and Lecturer at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University. She has held positions as fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and the Stanley A. and Barbara B. Rabin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, both at Columbia. She was previously a Fulbright fellow in Spain. She is the author of Jewish Literary Eros: Between Poetry and Prose in the Medieval Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022) and has published articles in Medieval Encounters; La Corónica; A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, Volume II; and Digital Dante. Her research specializes in the relationships among Hebrew, Arabic, and Romance literary traditions of the medieval Mediterranean.
Michael Frank and Dr. Levy’s conversation is available to view in full below.
This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.
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